


Shooting Lessons

by Dendritic_Trees



Category: Halo, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, F/F, No Concrit Please, Squishes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:31:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1619318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dendritic_Trees/pseuds/Dendritic_Trees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two girls who spend more time shooting than talking to other people meet in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Katniss Everdeen

Linda could probably be beautiful if she wanted to. She has deep red hair, green eyes and a heart shaped face. But she keeps her hair cut just long enough for the colour to show, and she spends most of her time in armour that makes her look like a machine when you can see her at all, so I don’t think she especially wants to. Then there’s the staring. Linda looks at everyone with the same flat stare, and she doesn’t blink. I think she really only know how to look at people through her rifle’s scope.

The rifle in question is lying on the ground between us. Linda has temporarily discarded it in favour of my bow, which she is turning over in her hands. “Show me?” she asks.

I know she’s seen me shoot before, I think its probably why she’s here, but I obligingly fire an arrow into a knot in a nearby tree. Linda’s eyes widen a bit and her lips quirk up. It’s the first recognizable expression I’ve seen on her face, so she’s probably delighted. “It’s so quiet,” she mutters, “what’s the range?”

I shrug, I don’t understand what she’s asking me, not really.

She must have realized, because she tries again. “How far can you shoot from?”

I show her by pacing backwards from my target into the trees until I can tell I’m about as far away from the tree as I can get, which is how I usually measure the distances for myself. Linda looks from the arrows in the tree to where I’m standing a couple of times and pads over to me. She’s just as quiet as I am when she walks and for a moment I feel like she isn’t intruding and actually belongs in the woods with me. Which is silly, there are a lot of reasons for her to have learned to move so quietly, most of which probably involve killing people, not hunting to eat. She doesn’t look like she has to hunt for her dinner all that often.

While we are standing in the trees not talking, a wild turkey hops into the edge of my vision. I shoot Linda a look and press a finger to my lips, then reach for another arrow. I don’t understand exactly why Linda is here, but I can’t spare the time to stand around with her. The bird drops into a feathery heap and I walk off to collect it, and my arrows. Linda meets me halfway, holding her rifle again and aims her stare at the turkey and the arrow in its eye.

“Do you lose your position?” Linda asks.

Once again, I don’t really know what she’s asking me, she’s just seen me leave my position to go retrieve the turkey. Whatever I was thinking a moment ago, I have very little in common with this girl. She is as different from me as any of the weirdly-decorated denizens of the Capitol, even if she does know how to move in the woods.

“Does firing the arrow give your position away? Could you fire from there again if you missed.” Linda clarifies, so I guess I’m both clueless and obvious.

“I don’t miss,” I mutter. I don’t understand what she wants from me, and I wish she would leave.

She’s staring at me instead of the turkey again. For just a second, I think she’s angry. But she just nods towards my bow. “It’s a good weapon,” she says, and holds her rifle out to me. “I could show you this and, we could trade?”

It occurs to me that Linda is trying to be friendly. I immediately feel guilty that I’ve only been putting up with her because she’s a foot taller than I am and I’m scared of her. Then I start to get angry that she thinks I have the luxury of being able to mess around just because she does. My bow is what keeps Prim and my Mother from starving, it isn’t a toy.

“I don’t have time for this!” I yell. “You think I’m out here having fun?”

Linda looks down at the turkey in my hand again. Then she looks down at her feet and shakes her head. We stand there for a moment, while Linda looks ashamed of herself and I try to work up the nerve to walk away. Then Linda obviously sees something I don’t, because she looks around suddenly, pulls a spyglass out of one pocket, glances through it, then hands it to me. “What about that?” she asks.

That is a deer. A very impressive, healthy buck, much larger than anything I’d ever attempt, and I point this out. “I can’t carry that.” I whisper.

“I can,” Linda whispers back and mimics my shushing gesture from earlier, lays down prone on the ground and reaches for her rifle. It’s a good thing the damn deer is so big, because the gun makes a huge echoing bang which I know will scare any good game in a reasonable distance into hiding. By the time I see the deer drop and turn around Linda is already off running to pick up her kill. Normal people can’t move like that. Normal girls aren’t that tall, and can’t carry two-hundred pound deer.

She drops the deer at my feet and looks expectantly at me for just a second before she kneels down and takes out a knife. She makes the same shot through the eye that I do, but a rifle round isn’t an arrow. A huge, ragged chunk of the dear’s head is completely gone. Just because she’s too prissy to eat organ meat doesn’t mean no one else wants it so I reach out and grab her wrist before she can start field dressing it. There are two thick, shiny, perfectly parallel scars running along the width of Linda’s wrist and a third running vertically straight up the middle of her forearm, which I can see now I’ve pushed her sleeve up.

“What are those?” I mutter. A woman in the seam once tried to kill herself after her husband was killed in the mines by cutting her arms a bit like that but it didn’t work and she lived anyway.

Linda glances at her arms likes she’s only just noticed them and shakes her sleeve back down. “Augmentation surgery,” she grunts, and goes to pick the deer back up again.

I take a minute to process that. That Linda is stronger and faster than a normal girl because someone cut her open and made her that way. Some people in the district think the UNSC, the people Linda works for are heroes, mostly because they’ve brought us food and power. As far as I’m concerned the UNSC and the Capitol fill the same role, some far away group of people who make the rules. They just happen to make somewhat better rules. I’d been thinking of Linda as basically a new kind of Peacekeeper, someone who’s different from me the same way people from the Capitol are different from me. But people in the Capitol have surgery to make themselves beautiful, not strong, they wouldn’t do anything that would leave them with scars like that. Linda is not like me, but she isn’t like the Capitol either, she’s something totally new.

I don’t know why she’s following me around. Does she just really want to learn how to use a bow? Does she find me a new, alien thing like I find her? But she is a good shot, and she did catch me a deer, and even though she’s very strange, she seems kind of nice. I sit back down on the ground. “You know, it can wait for an hour if you want.”


	2. Linda-058

Civilians are confusing.They’re always all over the place, like they don’t quite know what they’re doing. Which means I don’t either.And they’re so small.I’m a lot bigger now than I was, but they really are little, fragile and malnourished.If they could look after themselves, we wouldn’t be here.

Katniss is really very small, but she doesn’t look like she might break and always walks like she knows where she’s going.Where she’s going is mostly out into the woods.She isn’t a soldier, but she is a sniper.I think that makes her a little like me.At least, I hope it does.I’d like to have something to talk to her about. 

She’s actually a hunter, that’s what she’s out in the woods shooting for.I’d hate to interrupt her shot, that would be really rude and I want her to like me.So I’ve been waiting carefully for her to stop between tasks.But she just doesn’t.She’s amazingly efficient.Like a Spartan, except much littler, and hunting game instead of insurrectionists.I have hunted game before, for survival drills, and once on a mission.Never by shooting, it would be a waste of ammunition and much too loud.Katniss has some snares that look a lot like what Chief Mendez showed us how to make.Mostly though, she uses a bow. 

Deja taught us about archery.They used archers as snipers at the Battle of Agincourt.

When she finally stops and sits down with her bow laid out in front of her, I walk over to her.I’ve got my rifle with me.I’m not on duty, but I thought Katniss might like to see it.I put it down on the ground by her bow.

“Can I see?” I ask.

Katniss has been looking at me since I started walking over and hasn’t stopped.I actually kind of like it.She has a very warm stare.She nods when I hold my hand out over her bow.So I pick it up and turn it over in my hand.Its quite beautiful.Its all one piece of wood and very smooth.I turn it over in my hands a few times just to feel it.I don’t really know the details of how it works.We’ve used cross-bows a handful of times in training; they’re good infiltration weapons, if you need quiet and no one’s wearing body armour.We don’t get many missions where no one’s wearing body armour.And this bow doesn’t have anything like a cross-bow’s trigger mechanism.

“Show me?” I ask, holding it out to her.

Katniss looks right into my eyes as she takes her bow back.They’re very grey.Assault-rifle coloured. 

Firing a bow is a very different operation to firing a sniper rifle.Katniss straightens her spine, sets her feet and, holds her bow straight out in front of her.I can see the muscles in her shoulder working when she draws the arrow back.It’s a big, dynamic stance, the complete opposite of what I would do; lie down flat and very still, and tease the trigger. 

There’s a little whisper when the arrow releases, and a thud from its impact into a tree, where she shot it, into the centre of a respectably small knot.It’s the same sort of demo target I would have picked.And it was a good shot.Its all exciting to see and I can feel myself grinning at Katniss in spite of myself.“Its so quiet.What’s the range?” I ask.

Katniss shrugs and me.She doesn’t look happy.I really want her to be happy.But people say that about me too; that I don’t look like anything while I’m working and its annoying.I don’t want to annoy her.

I remember, as she stares irritably at me, that she isn’t actually a soldier and we probably don’t use the same terms.I feel stupid and embarrassed and my face has gone all hot from it.“How far can you shoot from?”I ask again quietly.I hunch up a bit so I’m not looming quite so much, but it doesn’t really help.

Katniss walks back further into the trees and fires another arrow, right next to the first, to show me, and I walk over to join her.She’s got a longer range than I would have expected with no scope.I want to talk to her, but I don’t have anything to say, so I just stand there and watch her.

She abruptly goes still and makes a shushing gesture so I freeze too and scan the perimeter on pure instinct.I almost miss what she’s looking at, a fat black bird.I was still looking for a human target, and by the time I’ve really registered it, she’s already shot it and has headed off to collect it.I follow and meet her when she’s halfway back, so we’re standing in a little clearing between clusters of trees.Katniss has hit the bird, I think it’s a turkey, directly through the eye.A perfect headshot.She’s marvellous.

“Do you lose your position?” I ask.If I’d made a shot like that, I’d already be moving, but she headed right back to me.Although there’s no one out here to give a position away to.But Katniss just stares blankly at me.I’ve messed it up again.She doesn’t know that terminology either.“Does firing the arrow give your position away?”I try, “could you fire from there again if you missed?”

“I don’t miss,” Katniss mutters at me.She sounds really annoyed.I would be annoyed too.I should stop talking, I’m no good at it.Shooting.I’m good at that.“It’s a good weapon,” I say, about the bow. “I could show you this and, we could trade?”I offer and hold out my rifle so Katniss can look at it.Its an SR-99-S5 Anti-Materiel rifle, but I’ve modified the scope.

Katniss looks at me, looks at my rifle, looks back at me and shrieks, “I don’t have time for this!Do you think I’m out here having fun!”

I take a step back and look down.Not because she’s frightening, she’s not credibly threatening at all, but because I’m embarrassed and its making me feel looming and clumsy.I’ve interrupted her while she was hunting; while she was working.She probably wants to smack me now.She definitely will not want to spend time with me.I should probably leave immediately.Except I’ve already mucked up her day’s work, so leaving probably won’t help.

Right then, right in the distance, in my visual range but probably outside of Katniss’s, a big deer trots out from between the trees.That would make up for her lost time.Maybe then she’ll forgive me.Except I’m not quite sure that she can actually see it, I’ve always been a good spotter, and my eyes are better now.So I remember to hand her my spare scope before I point out the deer and ask, “what about that?”

“I can’t carry that,” Katniss whispers to me, but I already knew that. 

“I can.” I explain. I lay down to set up my shot.The deer is just standing, munching a bush, it hasn’t noticed us, so it’s a straight forward headshot, and it drops where its standing, and I can go collect the body.I can see Katniss start backward from the muzzle blast in my peripheral vision.

She just sort of stares at me, when I put the deer down in front of her.I can’t tell if it’s a good stare, or a bad one.Its not an afraid stare, I’ve seen those.

She grabs my wrist instead of letting me field-dress the deer. I’m not offended. I’ve just disrupted her hunting, I wouldn’t trust me to do it right either. But she gets distracted. Why is she staring at my arm?

“What are those?” she says.

Oh right.

“Augmentation scars.”

Katniss makes a very strange face then. I can’t read it. Civilians use their faces for too much. I hope she doesn’t expect me to do something now.

But she just sits down and puts her bow out in front of her and says “You know, it can wait an hour, if you want.”

Okay. This is okay.


End file.
